Highlights
Warmer weather helped give store sales a lift according to Redbook whose year-on-year same-store sales tally is up 3.1 percent, 3 tenths higher than the prior week and the strongest rate since mid-February. Despite the gain, however, Redbook sees substantial weakness for March as a whole, the result of this year's late Easter which will push sales into April.

Definition
A weekly measure of comparable store sales at chain stores, discounters, and department stores. It is a less consistent indicator of retail sales than the weekly ICSC-Goldman index. It is also calculated differently than other indicators. For instance, figures for the first week of the month are compared with the average for the entire previous month. When two weeks are available, then these are compared with the average for the previous month, and so on through the month. It might be more useful to compare year-over-year figures since these are indeed compared to the comparable week a year ago. This index is correlated with the general merchandise portion of retail sales covering about 10 percent of total retail sales.
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